A story I read last month in Thomas Powers’ wonderful history, The Killing of Crazy Horse, has been vibrating in my mind ever since. The book is characterized by exhaustive research, adherence to ascertainable fact, scrupulous refusal to romanticize or demonize anybody, globally comprehensive perspective, beautiful sense of proportion, and willingness to offer humane and reasonable interpretation but only with a dignified sense of restraint. It is the best attempt I have read to depict the tangled relations among Indians and whites on the frontier during the period of the Sioux wars of the 1870s. Powers does justice (in all meanings of the phrase) to people on both sides and the many people in between. It is history written as if history were about human beings in all their multi-dimensionality.

The story that has stuck with me so vividly has to do with a battle that occurred in August, 1872, near the Yellowstone River. About five hundred U.S. soldiers and civilians were camped on the north bank, in territory from which whites were excluded by the Treaty of 1868. Coincidentally, a